PASADENA, California - They should’ve won the game. They should’ve danced in the confetti. They should’ve completed the greatest turnaround in college football history by winning the last BCS Championship Game.

You know it. I know it. The Auburn Tigers know it, and if the Florida State Seminoles are honest with themselves, they know it, too.

Florida State 34, Auburn 31 was Auburn’s game to win for the longest time, and Auburn lost it. Auburn 21, FSU 3 was Auburn’s lead to hold, and Auburn let it slip away, got it back and watched it vanish in the end.

This is no time to sugarcoat it. No team had led by as many as 18 points in the BCS Championship Game and lost. No team had led at halftime in this game and lost. So the SEC’s streak of seven straight national titles ended with the greatest collapse of the BCS Championship Game era.

Simply put, Auburn dropped the crystal football and shattered its dream season.

FSU’s Jimbo Fisher and Jameis Winston will look on the bright side and see it as the greatest comeback in the 16-year history of this game. All credit to the honorary Alabamian on the sideline who didn’t panic and to the native under center who threw the winning touchdown pass, but let’s be honest.

Championship teams don’t lose an 18-point lead, but Gus Malzahn's Auburn team that won the state, division and conference titles in the toughest state, division and conference in college football did. No matter how good FSU may be, there is no excuse.

That’s the thing that should rub them the wrong way for a long time to come. With five minutes left in the first half, Auburn led 21-3, and Florida State looked like it was one punch away from getting knocked out.

Auburn never landed that punch.

Instead the offense that ranked No. 5 in SEC history in total points went more than 33 minutes without scoring a touchdown. Quarterback Nick Marshall, who’d thrown one interception in his previous eight games, was picked off in the fourth quarter to set up the FSU touchdown drive that pulled the Seminoles within a point.

The defense, which had been at its best at key moments all year, gave up its first touchdown with 1:28 left in the first half and its last touchdown, the winning and losing touchdown, with 13 seconds left in the game.

The special teams, the outfit that won the Iron Bowl with The Return, surrendered its own Kick Six on a 100-yard kickoff runback that gave FSU the lead with 4:31 to play.

Just when it appeared the so-called team of destiny had run smack into a mountain of payback, Auburn got the ball back down 27-24 and calmly drove 75 yards in eight plays to take back the lead. Tre Mason covered the final 37 yards to pass Bo Jackson as the single-season rushing leader in school history with Bo on the sideline.

Auburn led 31-27 with 1:13 left, but that was 13 more seconds than Winston would need to drive FSU 80 yards the other way for the championship touchdown.

After Auburn’s final attempt at one last miracle with a hook-and-lateral fell well short, Winston rushed to embrace Auburn assistant Dameyune Craig, the mentor who’d recruited him to FSU.

“I was happy for him, but I was in shock,” Craig said, and why not?

It was shocking to see the Auburn team that found so many ways to win 12 of 13 games find so many ways to lose the last one, the biggest one, the one they’ll remember as much as The Prayer in Jordan-Hare and The Return.

“C’mon,” Chris Davis said, his face clouded in disappointment in the locker room. “It’s the national championship. What kind of emotions you expect?”

Auburn wouldn’t have been here without the senior, but in a cruel balancing of the karmic scales, he was the defender FSU’s 6-foot-5 Kelvin Benjamin outjumped and outfought for the winning touchdown pass from 2 yards out.

It was the kind of play we’d come to expect Auburn to make, one of many the Tigers finally didn’t.

There will come a time when these coaches and players will be able to look back at how far they traveled and how much they accomplished and smile. Now is not that time.